We Are All Alex Pretti Now

If nothing else, the last two weeks have been a dark reminder that we are all in a new time, something entirely different than November of 2024 when Republicans had the wind at their backs. Every day on the campaign trail now (I’m running for the MT01 congressional seat), I meet voters who have been lied to, disappointed, betrayed, and directly harmed by the same Republicans they voted for in 2024. Up until this week, many of the betrayals have been economic. But now the administration is veering into a heightened focus on inflicting a frightening level of violence on citizens and then attacking our fundamental freedoms.

Last week, following Alex Pretti’s tragic murder, the Trump administration launched a surprising full-on attack not just on Pretti, but also on our freedom of speech, our freedom to assemble and protest, and our Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful searches and seizures. Perhaps most importantly from a political standpoint, they also directly attacked the Second Amendment.

If you want to understand the shifting politics out in these congressional races, consider this next part carefully; without the slightest hesitation, Republicans reflexively blamed Pretti’s murder directly on his responsible gun ownership. Dozens of 2A orgs and millions of gun owners, who have never uttered a criticism of the Trump administration, subsequently lost their minds, rightly perceiving those attacks as another betrayal; this time it was of something cultural and foundational to the construction of MAGA.

Just like all of the swing/independent voters who thought Trump would make their lives better economically and have since been betrayed, those 2A advocates seemingly had no concept that the President or his cabinet members would ever even consider attacking the core tenets of gun ownership in the United States. But over and over the administration committed the worst kind of 2A blasphemy; “You can’t have gun’s, you can’t walk in with guns” or “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple” or “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.” These are all direct quotes from Trump or top administration officials attacking every American’s 2A freedoms.

This all caught my attention for a couple of reasons: first, I spent 25 years in the firearms industry and am familiar with the thinking of most 2A organizations. I intimately understand the arranged marriage between the MAGA movement and what gun advocates thought was unquestioning loyalty in return. And while I have long believed that someday Trump and his henchmen would think nothing of jettisoning our freedoms or abandoning critical principles of responsible gun ownership to increase power over us, the “gun groups” and their members are just now coming to this realization, and it obviously hurts.

The pain is particularly sharp because everyone can see that the Trump administration’s definition of gun ownership recognizes only one particular type of owner, namely, those masked, heavily armed, poorly trained ICE officers enforcing the violent will of the federal government on anyone they damn well please. These officers are the exact embodiment of what the gun world has been taught to resist.

On the other hand, most American gun owners, my boys and I included, have been taught to see ourselves in the example of Alex Pretti, a guy who did things by the book and stood up to the masked government tyranny just like all of the gun groups have been coaching for decades.

For many voters, the 2A is not so much an “issue” as it is a cultural glue, and when 2A groups and GOP voters watch Trump attack Pretti for doing precisely what the vast majority of gun owners have been taught to celebrate, it’s as shocking as if the Pope himself openly questioned the existence of God at a series of widely televised press gaggles.

Were such proclamations to come from the Vatican, church attendance would probably drop like the price of a Trump meme coin, and that’s exactly what 2A advocates and Trump political allies are freaking out about.¹

“I’ve spent 72 hours on the phone trying to unfuck this thing. Trump has got to correct his statements now,” said one Second Amendment advocate, granted anonymity to speak about private conversations. The person said Second Amendment advocates are “furious.” “And they will not come out and vote. He can’t correct it three months before the election.”

Another Trump acolyte laid out the direct electoral impacts even more directly;

“All you have to do is lose four, five, six percent of their base who left it blank, who didn’t write a check, who didn’t walk districts, you lose. Especially marginal districts — and the House is not a good situation right now.”

The second reason I’m watching this is that I’m running for Congress to make things better for our state and nation. To do that, I have to win (something too few Democrats have realized over the last decade). I recognize this frontal cultural attack as a magnifying glass on a long line of lived disappointments that are creating the conditions for electoral change in ‘26, and it can’t come soon enough.

Swing and Republican voters are souring on the GOP. The 2A attack is a loud cultural accelerator, lending credibility to the dozens of other Republican wounds that have been inflicted on voters. What follows are just a few of those injuries.

Out here on the campaign trail, it’s nearly impossible to find someone whose healthcare situation is anything but dire. Even Republican voters are screaming “uncle”, and they remember Trump’s emphatic, repeated, and broken campaign promises to dramatically lower costs, blow up the insurance system, and make healthcare great again. No one here is experiencing any greatness; in fact, it’s getting much worse. Many Montanans have lost coverage due to ACA and Medicaid cuts, or seen their premiums skyrocket, and voters are rightfully scared and pissed off about it.

Montana is under the cost-of-living gun gun too because our prices for just about everything are painfully high. This, despite Trump’s emphatic promise, “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.”² In fact, the Trump- and GOP-supported tariffs have made things much worse in Montana. Agriculture has been hit hard, and many businesses here are struggling due to the resulting high prices or the dramatic decline in Canadian tourism.³ (Gosh, who could have guessed insulting, threatening, and tariffing our neighbor would result in the equivalent of a big maple leaf middle finger?)

Instead of helping anywhere, Trump seems intent on pouring even more gas on the betrayals. Here in Montana, housing affordability is at a crisis level, the worst in the nation.⁴ Working people, especially anyone under 35, simply cannot afford to buy a home. But Trump cannot even be bothered to feign concern. Earlier this week, he made it clear that he wants housing prices to INCREASE, not decrease.⁵

"I don't want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes, and they can be assured that's what's going to happen."

I could almost hear my own young sons screaming, “WTF?” And the response was, in fact, immediate. If you need proof of the shifting politics, even the very same “young libertarian leaning men” who shifted right in the last election were joining my boys in the WTF chant, and I think the betrayal of fundamental freedoms is opening the door for them. Witness the public reaction by none other than Liam Mcollum, the vice chair of the Montana Libertarian Party.

My point in this piece is to highlight that each day, many more voters see themselves as Alex Pretti than as the administration that killed him. Much of that has to do with economics, and obviously, the brutal attack on Pretti is not the same as economic hardship; it’s much worse. But the administration’s attack on Pretti and the subsequent trashing of our freedoms has sent a broad, powerful cultural signal to everyone struggling in this country; this administration and its Republican enablers are not on our side; they have lied to us, they care nothing about our situation, our lives, or our fundamental freedoms. They’ll never even conceive of helping, and they’ll even kill us if we resist.

Each day, more people realize that our country is in a very serious crisis, and I’m working damn hard to make sure our response is very loud and clear: There’s going to be an election on November 3rd, 2026, and we are done with your betrayals.

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